Key Takeaways:
- Photojournalist Motaz Azaiza claimed that family killed in the October 7 War had no Hamas ties. He also said he was not involved with Hamas.
- Two family members were the Al-Halisi brothers tied to a 1986 Western Wall terror attack, who were released in the Shalit Deal
- Azaiza also recently admitted that he was a supporter of the Hamas movement as a youth.
Gazan photojournalist Motaz Azaiza has attracted scrutiny since the circulation of a September 3 interview in which he detailed Hamas’ influence on media coverage and how he had withheld publishing some content to benefit the group and terrorists, leading some to assert that he had been deceptive in his journalistic conduct.
Yet Azaiza has withheld other information since his rise to prominence in the wake of the October 7 War, including regarding an incident that was central to his story — the alleged airstrike that killed members of his family.
Shalit Deal Terrorist Ties
In a November 2023 New Arab interview, Azaiza said that his family members who had been killed in an October 12, 2023 incident had no connection to Hamas. He added that he was “not connected with Hamas.”
Yet according to research originally conducted by media consultant Leslie Kajomovitz, Azaiza’s remarks may have been technically true but omitted key details that would have voided the broader point about connections to terrorism.
At least two family members killed in the October 12 incident were veteran terrorists. Among the October 12 casualties were two brothers, Abdul Nasser Daoud Mustafa Al-Halisi and Tariq Daoud Mustafa Al-Halisi. The Al-Halisi brothers were responsible for a 1986 terrorist attack at the Western Wall that killed one person and wounded over 60. Palestinian Islamic Jihad was one of the many terrorist groups that claimed responsibility for the attack, but in an October 21, 1986 letter, the Israeli diplomatic mission to the United Nations informed the international forum’s Secretary-General that the suspects “were recruited by [Yasser] Arafat’s Fatah wing of the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) and trained in a Fatah camp in Jordan.”
The Al-Halisi brothers were serving life sentences, but were released as part of the 2011 Gilad Shalit hostage ransom, and married into the Azaiza family. They took shelter in the doomed family home along with the rest of the Azaiza family. It is not known why the family home was destroyed, but Azaiza’s note that they had no ties to Hamas belied the connections that did exist with Fatah terrorists.
The photojournalist’s family also had ties with Fatah, which became the dominant faction of the PLO. Most of Azaiza’s family was Fatah, he said in the September 3 interview, with his father and uncle working for the Palestinian Authority.
Past Hamas Support
Azaiza was critical of Hamas in the interview, lambasting their failure to make an agreement earlier in the war and the consequences that arose from the October 7 Massacre. Yet while Azaiza said in 2023, “I am not connected with Hamas,” he revealed in the podcast that as a youth he was involved with the terrorist movement.
“I was a Hamas supporter. Those who put on the headband, leaving school, and I was a Hamas supporter,” said Azaiza. “They sold them at the school gate for a shekel, so you wore it, and it was all about Hamas, resistance, rockets, and weapons, like a Palestinian child. I mean, what else would I love about that period of my life?”
Azaiza may indeed not have been connected to Hamas in 2023, and has since unleashed criticism of the group, but he was also withholding his past engagement.
Azaiza’s Credibility
Kajomovitz told HonestReporting that the “research raises questions far beyond Motaz’s reporting and credibility.”
“While hundreds of so-called journalists killed in Gaza have since been shown to have terror ties, in Motaz’s case, publicly available evidence of those ties was there from the start, yet media organizations, universities, the UN, NGOs, and elected officials actively elevated him as an international figure, giving him awards, sending him on tours and portraying him as a ‘heroic journalist’ and ‘survivor voice on Gaza,’” said Kajomovitz. “They had a responsibility to vet and fact-check the person they were elevating. The evidence was publicly available, so they should be held accountable for elevating him into fame, correct the record, and rescind those awards.”
Kajomovitz questioned if he disclosed the ties and interactions that he had with Hamas to U.S. authorities when he immigrated to the country.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
